User blog:Alzrius/Queen's Blade Bust Chart
The women of Queen's Blade are strong, powerful characters who have their own unique personalities, goals, and drives... all of which sit very awkwardly next to the fact that they're also unabashed sex objects. This is a disparity that I've spoken about previously, so I need not go into it again here. Instead, we're going to rank the ladies of the original Queen's Blade series - and its sequel, Queen's Blade: Rebellion - on one of their primary methods of sexual objectification: breast size. The following chart is listed in order from most to least bustiest among the girls. Each has the character's name, followed by their breast size in centimeters (with the size in inches following in parenthesis). Note that the size in inches is rounded to the nearest whole number; Menace and Sigui may both be listed as having thirty-five-inch chests, but Menace's 90 centimeters is really 35.43 inches, whereas Sigui's 88 centimeters is "merely" 34.65 - almost an inch of difference! Hence why the centimeter measurements are listed first: they're not only the primary sources, they're also more accurate. A few other things worth noting: characters that have the exact same breast size are listed in alphabetical order. Likewise, a few characters had their sizes change in the one year period between the original series and the Rebellion. As such, they've been listed here twice. Their original depiction has a parenthetical (QB) note after their name, and their Rebellion size has a corresponding (QBR) following their name. Additionally, characters that are normally grouped as a pair (such as Yuit and Vante) are split up for the purposes of this list. Finally, Melona, who can change her shape at will and thus has no official bust size, is listed at the end, using question marks as place-holders, purely for completeness. So without further ado, here's the ranking of breast sizes among the girls of Queen's Blade: Bust Chart Proper 1) Cattleya - 120 (47) 2) Melpha - 96 (38) 3) Werbellia - 96 (38) 4) Branwen - 95 (37) 5) Echidna - 94 (37) 6) Menace - 90 (35) 7) Risty - 90 (35) 8) Vante - 90 (35) 9) Claudette - 89 (35) 10) Tomoe (QBR) - 89 (35) 11) Elina (QBR) - 88 (35) 12) Leina - 88 (35) 13) Maria - 88 (35) 14) Sigui - 88 (35) 15) Aldra (QBR) - 87 (34) 16) Luna Luna - 87 (34) 17) Tomoe (QB) - 87 (34) 18) Airi - 86 (34) 19) Annelotte - 86 (34) 20) Laila - 86 (34) 21) Nyx - 86 (34) 22) Shizuka - 86 (34) 23) Elina (QB) - 85 (33) 24) Irma - 85 (33) 25) Liliana - 85 (33) 26) Izumi - 84 (33) 27) Nanael - 84 (33) 28) Tarnyang - 84 (33) 29) Mirim - 83 (33) 30) Alleyne - 80 (31) 31) Nowa - 78 (31) 32) Aldra (QB) - 75 (30) 33) Sainyang - 75 (30) 34) Ymir - 61 (24) 35) Eilin - 60 (24) 36) Yuit - 59 (23) 37) Melona - ?? (??) General Notes Having listed the chest sizes of the Queen's Blade cast members, there are a few things to keep in mind about what this list actually tells us, or rather, what it doesn't tell us. Bra Size Bra size is typically used as a shorthand for describing how large a woman's breasts are. The basics of this system - a combination of numbers and letters, with larger numbers and later letters denoting bigger breasts - are easily understood. As such, one might be tempted to think that with the above list of chest measurements, we can determine the bra sizes for the ladies of Queen's Blade. Unfortunately, that's not so. Let's examine why. As noted above, bra sizes are measured using a number-letter combination. The numerical part is the size of the woman's bust, gained by measuring the length required to get completely around her at the fullest part of her chest (usually over the nipples). This is the information that's listed above. The problem comes when trying to determine the alphabetical aspect of the alphanumerical bra size rating, better known as the cup size. Determining a woman's cup size is a two-step process. First, a second measurement is taken, finding the length required to get around her underbust - the part of her chest immediately below her breasts. The underbust measurement is then subtracted from her bust size, and the resulting number is then applied to a chart that lists the cup size depending on the derived number. Given that we don't have the underbust measurement for any of the Queen's Blade cast members, this makes finding their cup size impossible. Likewise, even if we had this measurement, the issue would be further complicated due to the fact that there is no standard chart for determining cup size based on the difference between a woman's bust and underbust measurements - each such chart is made by different bra manufacturers. Hence, while this list does show whose breasts are bigger than whose, there's no way to determine what their bra sizes are. Actual versus Apparent Size Even if we can't come up with easy-to-use bra size listings for the girls, this chart at least lets us tell who should look bustier than whom, right? The answer here is...no, not really. The problem with measuring, in a vacuum, how big a woman's breasts actually are is that this isn't necessarily the same thing as how big they look. Even leaving aside issues of body type (e.g. a woman with greater girth will have correspondingly larger breasts) - since the women of Queen's Blade tend to have figures that range from trim to athletic - a woman's height will have a noticeable influence on how large her chest appears to be. For example, Airi has an eighty-six-centimeter chest, whereas Leina's is eighty-eight centimeters, almost an inch larger. Hence, Leina's breasts should look bigger than Airi's, right? However, Leina is roughly five-foot seven-inches tall, compared to Airi's five-foot three-inches. This is significant, because making a purely visual determination of size is largely based around comparison; that is, comparing something to something else. In this case, it's typical to compare the size of a woman's breasts to the size of the woman herself. Given that, because Airi is shorter than Leina, its easy to have the impression that her breasts are larger, since they're on her smaller body. Even if Leina and Airi were side by side, this would likely appear to be true, since we tend to look at each character as a whole, rather than being able to isolate their specific parts from the rest of them. Hence, just because one character is slightly more busty than another doesn't, unto itself, mean that they're necessarily going to look it. Queen's Blade-specific Notes The major presumption that this list makes is that the three sizes listed for each girl are correct. On the surface, this seems like a fairly safe assumption to make; after all, the measurements are handed down as part of their official information from Hobby Japan, and what's official must certainly be correct. That's true, except for when it's not. The problem here is two-fold: first, sometimes the actual depictions of the characters seem to disagree with what's listed in their measurements (e.g. Melpha's breasts look comparable to Cattleya's, and yet they're listed as being much smaller). Now, some of this can be construed to the difficulty of judging size purely on the basis of a visual comparison, as noted above. However, in some cases, the disparity is great enough to overcome any such optical illusions. The second problem is that, in the event of such a conflict, which one is correct, the listed information, or the actual picture of the character? For this second problem, there's no clear answer, given that both are official. I'd say that it's easier to default to what's actually being depicted, rather than a bust listing, but this has an additional caveat: different artists depict the girls differently. For example, Airi is shown as having a very modest bust in the anime, whereas in the Queen's Blade: Exiled Warrior manga, she's shown as having a generous chest (though it helps that in the latter, her maid outfit also shows some cleavage). Given that, perhaps the best answer is to take what's listed above as being more akin to a guideline than a hard-and-fast delineation of how the girs should appear (particularly with the aforementioned element of uncertainty in visually appraising their chest size). After all, regardless of precisely how big their breasts are, the ladies of Queen's Blade are all incredibly sexy. Category:Blog posts